AMA with Zerodha's core team

[Meher_Smaran]

This Independence Day, we will be celebrating 14 years of Zerodha. Just like last time, we will be doing an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with our core team.

If you have any questions for us, please post them below and our core team will answer as many as possible on our YouTube channel.

[TitanTrader]

1. when zerodha’s ipo? still waiting. any updated plans?
2. any plans to make it a global platform in the future? by this I mean trading global markets with foreign market participants. it’s a big dream, but yea why not.

[pyarlath]

Question for CTO Kailash Nadh,

1.How does a day of CTO looks like? Especially growing and expanding company
What are your job responsibilities ?
2.How to you upkeep the Architecture of all the systems in such a changing world of regulations, products offered etc?
3.Balancing act of tech-debt to new features?
4.How large of a dev team do you have?, how many support staff are there?( QA’s, Architects, Product Managers and Release Managers)
5.What is the biggest fire fight that you were involved in on live system?
6. What are the top 5 problems that you face daily?
7. What is your techstack for the prime products? and did you do pros and cons analysis before selecting or it was more organic?
8. Do you still write and commit code in your live system? Or review PRs ? Just out of passion for technology?

[tallerballer]

Some of these questions were answered in a podcast episode. You might be interested.

Kailash Nadh, CTO @zerodhaonline|Side projects, hacker culture and scaling with sense| SCALER POD 05

[SpacemanSpiff]

@TitanTrader

when zerodha’s ipo? still waiting. any updated plans?

As a customer, hopefully never. Sometimes companies start enshittification to feed their ‘growth’.

[Amit_Kumar9]

Does Zerodha plans to provide Smart Order Routing (SOR) facility?

[nithin]

@TitanTrader

when zerodha’s ipo? still waiting. any updated plans?

The philosophy with which we work, hmmm… IPO doesn’t work, I think. Setting revenue targets and chasing them down etc. But that said, not doing an IPO makes us sound like a hypocrite when we ask everyone else to do so.

We are building different adjacent businesses like Zerodha Capital, Zerodha Asset Management, and more. Maybe in the future, when they all significantly can add revenue, maybe then.

Broking only has 0 predictability and loads of regulatory risk. We don’t want to even think of IPO unless there is predictability in terms of revenue.

@TitanTrader

any plans to make it a global platform in the future? by this I mean trading global markets with foreign market participants. it’s a big dream, but yea why not.

Ah, no, plans. The government would not make it easy for Indians to invest abroad. And generally, India is at the centre of the earth right now, so it makes more sense to just focus on this market.

[nithin]

@Amit_Kumar9

Does Zerodha plans to provide Smart Order Routing (SOR) facility?

In a sense, we already offer SOR; we tell the customer prices on both exchanges before placing the order. The SOR that NSE is referring to is very tough for us to offer at the scale we work. Anyways the price for a stock on both the exchanges is almost the same today.

[Augustine_Charly]

@nithin

India is at the centre of the earth right now

I’d love to hear your reasoning for that. I share the same sentiment, but that might be largely due to home-country bias.

[nithin]

@Augustine_Charly

I’d love to hear your reasoning for that. I share the same sentiment, but that might be largely due to home-country bias.

It is not because of home country bias but for a reason: India has the highest number of 20 to 30-year-olds worldwide, income is going up (at least for the top 5 to 10 crore Indians), mobile penetration is high, and so on. There is no better time than now to build a business in India.

[Augustine_Charly]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts .

@nithin

It is not because of home country bias but for a reason

Sorry for the confusion, I meant my sentiment could be due to the home country bias, not yours.

[TitanTrader]

thank you

[Gautam]

@nithin Why does it take too long to implement even simple things?

1. Sticky order window is already available in the main page, is implementing it in the pop out chart windows as well a lot of work? It’s been almost a year but still no word.
2. The earlier functionality of the P&L page which showed the combined P&L of all trades of all days is gone. One could easily keep tally or see P/L of any particular day with ease. Is there any chance to bring that functionality back?
3. Placing large option orders is a headache. One can use iceberg but it puts multiple orders in stagered way… ie one order needs to be filled for the next to be placed, can an option be added to place whole order in one go?

[nithin]

@Gautam

Placing large option orders is a headache. One can use iceberg but it puts multiple orders in stagered way… ie one order needs to be filled for the next to be placed, can an option be added to place whole order in one go?

I will get someone to check on the first two points.

The exchange restricts the per-order lot size. The only way to place a large order is through an iceberg or a basket, which essentially breaks up one large order into smaller orders.

[TheGouda]

@Gautam

The earlier functionality of the P&L page which showed the combined P&L of all trades of all days is gone. One could easily keep tally or see P/L of any particular day with ease. Is there any chance to bring that functionality back?

Could you please DM more details, so we can check?

[tradewealth]

@nithin
Hi nithin. Heard about your health incident.Hope you are doing well and back with perfect health. Instances like these just makes you realize the transient nature of things in life.

Few features that have been on waitlist since last 3-4 years.Listing some below.

1)When is zerodha planning to go live with interoperability ? There have been instances when one of exchange malfunction users should have option to settle in other exchange. Recent big fiasco was with NSE in feb 2021. It’s been more than 3 years but zerodha is yet to go live with interoperability. Everytime a timeline of 3-6 months is given.

2. Also on a similar note with other questions. When is zerodha planning to give its users access to international markets. To make investing community mature international diversification is really important. When other countries have cheap access to our markets why shouldn’t we have the same access.

3)This has been raised a lot of times before. Why doesn’t zerodha provide unlimited/bulk trading order plan. it doesn’t have to be extremely cheap but some discount should be given to users punching relatively large number of orders. Something like 10/15 rs per order if your daily/monthly number of orders crosses particular number.

4)Also zerodha used to run a lot of interesting initiatives few years back. Like 60 day challenge with brokerage refund. Do you plan to bring some initiatives back.

Thanks

[nithin]

@tradewealth

Hi nithin. Heard about your health incident.Hope you are doing well and back with perfect health. Instances like these just makes you realize the transient nature of things in life.

You bet it is. Transient and uncertain.

Recovering, 85% there.

@tradewealth

1)When is zerodha planning to go live with interoperability ? There have been instances when one of exchange malfunction users should have option to settle in other exchange. Recent big fiasco was with NSE in feb 2021. It’s been more than 3 years but zerodha is yet to go live with interoperability. Everytime a timeline of 3-6 months is given.

We should be able to enable the last leg in the next 3 to 6 months. It required huge architectural changes.

@tradewealth

Also on a similar note with other questions. When is zerodha planning to give its users access to international markets. To make investing community mature international diversification is really important. When other countries have cheap access to our markets why shouldn’t we have the same access.

This, I have mentioned above, is not something that we will be offering.

@tradewealth

3)This has been raised a lot of times before. Why doesn’t zerodha provide unlimited/bulk trading order plan. it doesn’t have to be extremely cheap but some discount should be given to users punching relatively large number of orders. Something like 10/15 rs per order if your daily/monthly number of orders crosses particular number.

No, it doesn’t make sense to complicate the pricing structure.

@tradewealth

4)Also zerodha used to run a lot of interesting initiatives few years back. Like 60 day challenge with brokerage refund. Do you plan to bring some initiatives back.

Yeah, the regulations required us to stop the initiative. It was getting classified as an incentive, and we had to stop it.

[OmCar]

PLEASE bring back the old “Intraday” & “Longterm” tabs. This update with intraday switch is HORRIBLE.

You can keep the quantity and price one above the other as in the latest update. Just remove the intraday “switch”.

[OmCar]

Do you plan to launch MTF this year? (Sarcasm) (sorry!)

But seriously though, any ETA?

[nithin]

@OmCar

PLEASE bring back the old “Intraday” & “Longterm” tabs. This update with intraday switch is HORRIBLE.

It remembers your last selection. I’d say you give it a little time. We’ve made these changes only after a lot of iterations to make order placement easier. Some disorientation when changing something you were so used to is unavoidable, but it will normalise.